Transnational families negotiating migration and care life cycles across nation-state borders

Over the past two decades, globalisation has propelled millions of economic migrants from poor sending-nations to seek employment in economically better-off receiving-nations, often establishing new offshoot family formation, notwithstanding national migration policies trending towards tightening border controls. State policies on border crossing and circular migration shape and frequently impinge on the development aspirations, welfare-creation strategies and ways and means of provisioning family life cycle care needs. In the process, transnational families often make material sacrifices and contend with emotional tensions between migrant parents or spouses and their stay-behind family members. Conversely state policies, which do not take family aspirations into account in migration decision-making, are unlikely to effectively meet their intended objectives.